Fonts Looking Crappy

[Necro]

Just curious, but I'm trying to develop a skin for use on my HTPC, and it seems GBPVR shows fonts...well...like crap. There's this weird black border region around the text. Its ONLY done in GBPVR. Tried changing font sizes, etc...to no avail.

Any ideas? Is there someway to turn on font anti-aliasing or something along those lines? BEcause right now it looks...ugly.

[sub]

Where abouts are you talking about? I dont see any black border around any of my text. Can you post a small area of a screenshot?

All the screens I wrote in GB-PVR use font anti-aliasing already (which sometimes causes people to ask why the fonts look a little blurry).

[Necro]

See the kind of border edgey area with the blackness.

This is how it looks on the monitor...only GBPVR does this....

[sub]

I think windows has some settings for font smoothing, which does something like this. Right click on the desktop and check the properties.

[Necro]

I have on clear type at the moment. Should that be off? Kind of weird if so.

I'll test it and post again. (so we can keep up this sub 5 minute reply thread )

[Necro]

It appears that GB-PVR screws up and does the above when you use ClearType font smoothing. Who would have thought.

(It appears it's using whatever you select in windows...if you turn off the smoothing totally, and don't use the 'standard' method it looks REALLY bad. This still leaves the fonts a bit 'fuzzy' and without hard edges though IMHO)

[Necro]

Hey, while I have you checking threads, anyway to make a color be transparent on a drawn object ina skin? (like lightgrey fill, but 50% transparent?)

ANd thanks a ton.

[j3flight]

I had noticed this same problem before and was going to post about it but forgot.

I really like the way cleartype looks on my monitor and don't want to turn it off 99% of the time. However, it does make a big difference in your app and unfortunately also gets output via the tv-out port on my video card. This is more of a wishlist item, but is it possible to programmatically turn it off for your window?

I know cleartype doesn't apply to the whole screen as some java apps I have don't get smoothed like my other apps do. Not sure if it's easy, but just a thought.

Thanks

[sub]

It appears that GB-PVR screws up and does the above when you use ClearType font smoothing. Who would have thought.

Its not a GB-PVR thing. I've never used this setting with GB-PVR myself, but I recognise the screenshot you attached based on what I've seen the setting do to fonts on the desktop and in other applications.

Hey, while I have you checking threads, anyway to make a color be transparent on a drawn object ina skin? (like lightgrey fill, but 50% transparent?)

I dont do this as it makes the programming a bit more difficult, and the menus are already slow enough on slow machines. The .net libraries I use for graphics are really slow with alpha blended graphics.

[capone]

Go here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downl...rtoys.mspx

and get the ClearType Tuning Tool.

Run it, and see if it helps.